If selecting a CMS is easy, choosing the right service provider to make that CMS successful can be downright difficult. After all, what exactly is the difference between a digital agency, system integrator, consultancy, or any other unique brand positioning claim made by a service provider?

There are many questions with few clear answers:

Do you bring in a service provider to help with the selection process, after you select, or while you are selecting?

Will a service provider be too biased if they specialize in a handful of CMS platforms?

Do you need an external consultant to the consultants?

How much depth does a service provider have in the capabilities beyond technology?

How much expertise do you need, and in what areas?

Can you rely on your CMS vendor to provide the right shortlist of recommended service providers?

Does the service provider work across the broader marketing technology ecosystem? If so, which platforms are important beyond CMS?

How large of a service provider do you need?

Is your service provider partner equipped to handle the new work and potentially learn a new CMS?

How do you really know if a service provider delivers quality work?

Where do you need specialized help on CMS vs. a more “full service” partner?

Compounding these challenges is that there’s no common definition of a service provider, no standard way organizations configure agency rosters with overlapping skill sets, no easy way to get unbiased reference data, and no central clearinghouse of service providers with the information you need to make a selection. Not to mention, a partner that was perfect for an organization just like you (size, industry, platform) may be the exact wrong fit for your needs.

Add it all up, and you can see where sending out an open RFP and hoping for the best starts to look like a path of least resistance.

“Thousands of services providers have popped up, hoping to help firms solve these digital experience delivery challenges, and some are much further along in their digital maturity than others are. These firms come from a multitude of backgrounds: everyone from your systems integrator helping with your SAP implementations to your marketing agency you’ve worked with on direct outreach and paid media.”

In the report, Forrester Research (which caters primarily to the Fortune 1000 set) profiles nearly 50 service providers with “significant digital experience delivery practices” and offers a framework to map vendor experiences and their “distinct DNA” with specific digital experience technologies. (Disclosure: Connective DX is one of the service providers included in the report.)

This mapping is helpful, but still high-level and specific to an enterprise audience. Service providers on the list range from 60,000 employee consultancies to 70-person specialists. And what about the thousands of partners not on that list, many of which could be a good fit?

Digital Clarity Group consults on web content management and customer experience selection, founding the company in 2012 on the principle that they will not help organizations select a technology unless they also help with the selection of the service provider.

Their 2014 Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management profiles 47 service providers (with some overlap, but a lot of different organizations than Forrester) focused on digital experience and technology delivery. (Connective DX is included in this report as well.)

In the report, Digital Clarity Group president Scott Liewehr writes:

“No doubt, software is increasingly necessary for successful customer experience management, and selecting the wrong products can have a crippling effect. But, as we argue in the introduction to this report, more software only means that more emphasis must be placed on finding the right partners to implement and integrate the technologies and to assist with research, analytics, business strategy, and other services for a complete solution.”

Both of these guides are solid starting points for understanding the landscape and getting independent advice on how service providers fit specific needs.

One of the challenges in selecting a service provider at the same time you are selecting a new CMS platform is that, even done in tandem, the CMS selection process can still drive much of the service provider evaluation criteria.

Service providers are well equipped to help frame some of the bigger opportunities (such as customer research and digital strategy) we wrote about in the CMS selection myth, but a joint evaluation process often over emphasizes how service providers’ credentials support a specific CMS platform, as opposed to how strong the service provider is on competencies beyond CMS such as experience design, content strategy and analytics.

Strategic service providers often get boxed into a technology-centric process in a tag-along role that doesn’t allow for the right framing or discussions. How this process is structured matters a lot in selecting the right partner.

An alternative starting point is to ask the CMS vendor who they recommend as a partner. This can be helpful too, after all who knows the partner community better than the software vendors themselves? However, proceed with caution: Every partner handles this process differently, with mixed results.

The CMS vendor (often a salesperson) may not fully understand all of the partner capabilities beyond the technology. They also may feel inclined to send the opportunity to the partners who have recently referred them opportunities (you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours).

Every CMS vendor uses different criteria for tiering partners and assessing quality. The top service providers listed on a CMS vendor’s site are often the ones that bring in the most licensed revenue, but they may not be the right fit for your needs.

This is all a very long way of saying, “It’s complicated.”

It’s genuinely a muddy landscape to navigate, and a difficult decision to make. It’s no wonder that many of our clients get referred in from other customers we work with. Turning to peers you trust, and talking to references early, is often the most reliable starting point for finding out which service providers may be worth working with.

It’s confusing on our side, too. As a service provider that gets many inbound inquires for content management-driven work, we are often shortlisted alongside partners who are very different in size, capabilities and culture. In those cases, there’s always a feeling that one of us isn’t a good fit, but it’s not always clear who it is.

We have very specific qualification criteria on the types of organizations that we work with successfully, and the type of work we want to be doing. We love to have these early conversations and typically find that about 10-15% of the organizations that reach out to us are a good fit to take the next steps. For the ones that aren’t, we’re always happy to refer them to partners we trust, as well as share our perspective on the service provider landscape.

While this process can be hard, finding the right service provider pays off big time. Most battle-tested digital veterans agree that success of your digital initiatives is much more dependent on your partners and internal teams than on the software you end up selecting.

What have your experiences been finding the right service provider? What advice would you share with others just starting the process?

]]>http://www.cmsmyth.com/2015/06/selecting-a-service-provider-is-hard/feed/0http://www.cmsmyth.com/2015/06/selecting-a-service-provider-is-hard/Selecting a CMS is easyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheCmsMyth/~3/jlv7ntkgl6Y/
http://www.cmsmyth.com/2015/06/selecting-a-cms-is-easy/#commentsMon, 01 Jun 2015 13:52:24 +0000http://www.cmsmyth.com/?p=3755Organizations often believe picking the right CMS is a difficult decision. This couldn’t be further from the truth—selecting a CMS is the easy part. It’s everything else that is hard.

Yes, it’s a decision that can require an assist from some specialized expertise. After all, who—besides consultants and analysts—has time to keep tabs on all the different platform roadmaps, capabilities, vendor financials, and partner ecosystems?

Truth be told, we can usually size up a CMS platform fit quickly and point an organization toward a few very viable solutions. Yet, over and over, we see long drawn out CMS selection processes with detailed RFPs, short lists that aren’t short, and time wasted in all the wrong areas. (Hello cart, meet horse.)

Some people believe this is simply how one procures enterprise software. Other times, external consultants encourage the behavior by starting with the hundreds of potential CMS platforms out there. The reality is there are fewer and fewer credible enterprise CMS options these days, as vendors merge, markets mature, and lines get drawn on fit, price, and technologies.

We’ve written about this CMS selection myth before, as well as the real reasons people hate their CMS. Most people realize it’s not all about the technology, but somehow that’s still what gets the most focus. Everyone wants to help you pick a CMS (just Google it), but there’s a much shorter line of folks ready to help you ask and answer the hard questions necessary to successfully approach CMS as a discipline.

A CMS selection process is still necessary of course.

We have our own approach, which educates organizations on our seven fit factors and helps frame the decision in the larger context of an overall CMS roadmap, marketing technology ecosystem, content strategy, internal staffing, and governance.

This method of selecting a CMS is less about pitting potential vendors against each other in an RFP battle royale (which still happens a lot) and more about being educated on the landscape and getting organizational buy-in for the real change that needs to happen to support a new platform and publishing approach.

Many delight in using the process to force vendors to jump through hoops, do unpaid proofs of concepts, and slash pricing at the end of the quarter. However, those perceived license savings are minuscule compared to the opportunity costs of not setting the platform you select up for success.

I am shocked at the number of organizations that still sign on the dotted line (and pay for) the CMS licensing without any plan, budget, or roadmap for how to make it successful.

I’m wicked excited to be leading a workshop on CMS Selection at Confab Intensive this fall in Portland, Oregon. My session, CMS selection: Getting beyond the bells and whistles to what really matters, will certainly spend some time on the vendor landscape and how to avoid picking a lemon.

More importantly, I’ll be sharing our frameworks and approach on how to get your organization in the right mindset to make the change, how to set proper expectations during the process, and connect it to a larger experience and content strategy.

If you can’t join me in Portland for the workshop, feel free to drop me a line, and I’ll be happy to try and quickly point you in the right direction for a CMS platform. However, a word of warning: It’s been implied I’m the worst CMS salesperson in the world, so don’t plan on breaking out the checkbook on the first call.

Hating your CMS is so trendy these days you’d think it was 2008 all over again. A few weeks ago, Gerry McGovern posed the age old question of why organizations hate their CMS so much and last week Fierce Content Management editor Ron Miller had a copy and paste error that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

“In all the years I’ve been doing this I can’t think of an organization that was genuinely happy with what they have,” wrote McGovern, hopefully using hyperbole to make his point. I’d like to think he’s met at least one satisfied web publisher (they exist, really).

It’s true that frustrations can easily boil over when it comes to working with CMS. It’s a primary reason we started this blog and spend time creating handy (albeit tongue in cheek) utilities like our CMS Pain Assessment Tool. We’re big fans of content management as both a strategic discipline and technology and like to see it done right.

While CMS is a favorite punching bag when complaining about website woes, the jabs are often knee jerk emotional responses to much deeper organizational issues. Sometimes the technology unfairly takes the fall, while at other times the technology deserves the blame

In an attempt to unpack the rage, we decided to explore some of the underlying reasons folks dream of going all Office Space on those WYSIWYG editors. Here’s nine we came up with in no particular order.

1. CMS that’s built for buyers, not end users

Let’s face it — Enterprise software doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to end user experiences and CMS is no exception. While you can’t paint all solutions with the same brush, Karen McGrane has described CMS as the “enterprise software UX forgot.” It’s true some vendors are making positive strides but the reality is the buyers of CMS are not typically the end users. Jason Fried of 37 Signals sums this up as the reason why enterprise software sucks in his blog post on the topic:

“The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.”

This disconnect causes significant friction (a slippery slope to hate) with end users who care less about shiny new features and more about getting their routine tasks done day in and day out. In an attempt to provide ultimate flexibility to all types of users (most things are truly possible in most enterprise platforms), many platforms cater to none.

2. Short changing the implementation

If you hear a chorus of CMS vendors calling foul on that last reason, they do have a point. While software vendors bear the brunt of the negative vibes, the reality is that the implementation is far more important to the overall success than which platform was selected.

“Our experience and research has found that 75-80% of the web content management challenges faced by organizations can be attributed to the implementation rather than to the [technology] itself.”

While you can nitpick on the percentages, our experiences have been similar. If an organization plans, implements and manages the CMS as a technology-centric project, it’s almost certain to leave a trail of dissatisfied end users, authors and editors. Companies that get CMS right pay careful attention to selecting partners, investing the right resources, sequencing the right initiatives and framing the overall project within a larger digital and content strategy. The implementation and approach make all the difference in the world.

3. Delusions of decentralization

A fundamental promise of any CMS worth its maintenance fee is the ability to decentralize publishing responsibilities to non technical users. This was as true in 1998 as it is today. While this is a real (and realized) benefit, the most vocal critics of a CMS platform are often the ones who use it the least. As Margot Bloomstein recently tweeted, “A tool alone does not alone create a culture…of distributed ownership.”

We’ve explored this issue before in our article on Stop letting people use your CMS. It’s unrealistic to expect anyone would enjoy using complicated piece of software, however nice the interface, if they have to re-learn it every few months to accomplish very basic tasks.

The people we’ve met who are happiest with their CMS are typically the power users who are in it day in and day out and have learned to use the system. What makes them unhappy, however, is having to deal with the dozens (or hundreds) of angry end users who (with pitchforks and rakes in hand) are demanding better tools and training and threatening to “go rogue” with their open source platform of choice.

Thankfully, there’s been a shift toward larger, more experienced centralized content teams who help enable the broader organization and work with decentralized users. Figuring out how to support distributed authors with the right governance model and effective editorial processes go a long ways toward having happy end users — wherever they may live in the organization.

4. Trapped in a website management paradigm

It’s unfair, really, that this whole mobile thing came along just when CMS vendors, service providers, and end organizations were starting to really understand how to make CMS work.

The inconvenient truth is that most modern web content management systems have been organized around web publishing, not the management of content independent of channel or presentation layer. The urgency of this shift is highlighted in Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile book and her overall point of view on the role of adaptive content.

Some see this trend forcing a great decoupling (or re-decoupling depending on your years in the industry) of content management’s core capabilities from delivery functions. At a minimum it is forcing vendors to re-evaluate product roadmaps, author experiences and the overall approach to multi-channel publishing.

These changes, however, aren’t happening fast enough to meet the demands of marketing and web teams racing to keep up with their customers voracious appetites for everything mobile. Nor are the processes for planning user experiences and content strategy evolving fast enough. A content strategy to support highly personalized experiences across multiple devices isn’t realistic when most organizations are struggling to get through the basics.

This awkward in-between period is causing a lot of pain, and yes hate, from end users of CMS who are feeling the pressure to deliver on the mobile mandate yesterday and wondering why their tools, service providers and colleagues aren’t yet ready.

5. Forgetting to consider the author experience

For as much as we trumpet customer experience and user centered design, CMS implementations almost alway fall short in thinking about the author experiences. As Rick Yagodich said in his post The experience alphabet: AX comes before UX, “authors are people too.” He goes on to write:

If we fail to make it easy for our authors…to provide the engagement mandated for those interactions with the customer, they will behave as any other user. They will avoid the chore of dealing with us.

Don’t fall victim to what we call the ease of use myth where everyone agrees that the CMS author experience needs to be simple, but fails to do the work necessary to define it and implement it.

The out-of-the-box authoring tools provided by a CMS are like a big ball of clay that need to be molded for the unique needs of users dealing with specific content structures, metadata and relationships. These workflows are best assembled in packages more often than pages. Many author experiences should be custom designed the same way you map out the pathways and use cases for external users on a website.

We recently developed a large custom authoring experience for a life sciences company that needed to have scientists and laboratory assistants managing highly complex data. The standard content editor and in-line page editing tools would simply not work for these audiences. Paying attention to the needs of your end users is a fantastic way to stop (or at least slow) the hate mail rolling into the central web group.

6. CMS as an innocent bystander in a political war

It’s important to remember that sometimes frustrations with a CMS have nothing to do with the actual platform. The change management involved with a CMS overhaul is a rough and tumble business.

We’ve run into individuals that hate the CMS because they disagreed with the platform choice or resent decisions made around governance and access. There’s also a vendor fit necessary between end organizations and the CMS vendors and sometimes those relationships are simply not compatible. A poor support and maintenance relationship can sour an experience that had been positive to that point. Some relationships also never recover from the promises made during the sales process that didn’t meet expectations.

We’ve consulted with organizations that know their existing platform can work for them but are forced to replace it because it carries so much political baggage and ill will inside the organization. These are unfortunate situations that can be minimized by proper expectation setting and a good governance structure.

7. Failing to put a content strategy in place

Unless you’ve been off the grid for a bit, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about the importance of content strategy (here’s an epic list to catch you up if you’ve been away). While a content strategy doesn’t equate to your overall digital and customer experience strategy, it is a prerequisite for success with any CMS.

The most unhappy organizations we talk to have not taken the time to put a content strategy in place, and more importantly have not assigned any dedicated internal resources to helping manage the content post launch.

With all that said, a content strategy alone isn’t a silver bullet for eliminating frustrations with the CMS. Often times the content planning is done in complete isolation from the CMS platform and technology strategy. The folks who care about content need to be willing to roll up their sleeves and help make the technology work better.

In some cases organizations with mature content strategy capabilities are the most vocal with their CMS pain because the authors and editors are sophisticated enough to know what they actually need from the technology. This can be a nice problem to have if that energy can be channeled for the greater good.

You see, there’s a murky space between the idea of content, and the hard reality of a content management system. We’re seeing situations where a content strategist has come in and developed a undeniably great plan for content — how to organize it, or develop it, or present it, or whatever — and then left. The organization now has a solid plan, but no idea how to implement it, technically

However you decide to staff the many different roles, it’s critical that you have folks who can work across the disciplines.

8. Selecting a less than ideal CMS

All too often organizations unfairly point to the technology as the reason for their struggles. Seasoned CMS professionals know that the tool (and the selection process) are rarely the primary issue (see the other eight reasons in this post).

While it’s true that you can get almost any CMS to do anything you want with a little elbow grease and room full of developers, the reality is that some will fit your organization better than others and you can make a poor selection. The CMS you select will make a big difference if it’s not aligned to your business model and overall company culture.

A large multi-national company putting 30 sites onto a single platform across 20 languages isn’t well suited for a simple CMS product geared toward single site management. A marketing-centric organization focused on demand generation will struggle with a platform unable to help connect content to revenue and support at-scale marketing functions.

Go too much against the grain of how the platforms are intended to work and the cracks in the dam will start to surface before eventually giving way to a tidal wave of frustration from the users and the overall business.

There are several additional reasons the CMS selected may not be working out. Perhaps you were sold a CMS and feature set that doesn’t exactly line up to reality (Spoiler alert: sales folks are good at selling). Or your business model has evolved and the CMS no longer fits or scales. Often times swapping out the technology is the only way forward to fix fundamental problems.

But when you have to go through the process of finding a CMS, be sure you don’t fall victim to what we can the CMS Selection Myth. Spend the time to make sure the organization is prepared to be successful with CMS before you make the leap.

9. Setting the wrong expectations

Perhaps the biggest disconnect between ‘happy’ and ‘I want to throw this platform off the roof’ comes from the expectations set for the CMS to begin with. In our article Are you making the right CMS promises, we examine the expectation gap that exists between the promise of CMS and how it actually works when implemented. While organizations tout benefits like streaming efforts, decentralizing teams and saving money, the reality is that a new CMS usually takes more resources, not less as we write in the article:

In most cases, a CMS actually adds cost and complexity and takes more effort to maintain and run. Often times enabling more users to edit content means creating a less flexible system for the power users and developers who spend the majority of the time maintaining the site.

This rosy stories we tell ourselves set us up for a much harder fall when that worldview doesn’t align. There’s enough blame to go around here as software vendors, agencies and end organizations are all trying to share an end vision that excites the organization and gets buy in for the hard work needed.

Turning those CMS frowns upside down

While it’s easy to hate on the technology, it’s only part of the story when it comes to CMS challenges. There’s a lot of lip service given to putting the right people and processes around a CMS platform project, but organizations ultimately vote with how they allocate resources. It’s on all of us to do a gut check and make sure we’re prioritizing the right elements for success. In looking at budgets for CMS projects technology almost always gets the lion’s share of the upfront investment. When is the last time you saw a $500,000 line item for a content strategy rollout?

The good news is that now more than ever vendors and end organizations understand the value of content and the role of CMS in the overall business and customer experience. While it’s unrealistic to think people are going to love their content management systems overnight, we are optimistic that the next wave of tools and disruptive thinking will help improve the overall experience for both authors and customers alike.

Did these 2,500+ words capture all the reasons people hate their CMS? Probably not. Share your own ideas in the comments as well as any lessons learned on how you’ve been able to overcome these challenges.

We’ve arrived in Salt Lake City and are readying ourselves for tomorrow’s kick-off of the 2015 Adobe Summit. The weeklong summit gathers Adobe’s business ecosystem—from clients and partners to analysts and end users— to discuss what’s ahead in the world of digital marketing.

The week will start slowly with Monday’s programming mostly of interest to agencies and other partners. We’ll learn about Adobe’s vision for digital marketing and how agencies like ours can help our clients succeed using Adobe’s tools.

It looks like Tuesday will start with a bang with Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayeng, delivering a keynote talk about how brands are moving beyond marketing to deliver powerful brand experiences to consumers. That’s a topic near and dear to us. He’ll be joined onstage by a number of celebrity guests—including a favorite author, Michael Lewis.

Of course, through all this, there’s 10+ topic tracks and hundreds of speakers discussing everything from analytics and personalization to social and experience management. And a convention center hall packed with exhibitors showing off their latest and greatest tools. My brain’s hurting already.

We’re planning to depart on Friday—exhausted and energized—but we’ve already met some brave souls who are sticking around for a ski day. Good for them!

Let us know if you’ll be in Salt Lake City this week. We’d love to meet up for coffee or conversation. If you can’t be with us, tell us if there’s something you’d like us to check out for you. We’re happy to be your eyes and ears here at the summit!

Massive apologies for our cone of CMS blogging silence over the last few months. It would be easy to blame the lull on our soul crushing New England winter, but the truth is we’ve been absolutely buried helping organizations with actual work — from digital strategy and experience design to CMS planning and implementations. You know, the messy bits that give us inspiration for this blog.

We are also hard at work on some exciting news and plans for this blog and our agency. It’s going to be a fun 2015, and we’ll be keeping you posted along the way. In the meantime, there’s a lot to catch up on. Here’s some of what’s going on.

Personalization is happening (for real)

It may very well turn out 2014 was the year everyone talked about web personalization, but 2015 is when everyone starts doing it. Some positive proof points: We just launched a new global B2B website with personalization capabilities, and have several other projects underway that are directly embedding personalization into the experience and technology strategies. This is progress we weren’t consistently seeing one year ago and a positive sign that the capabilities required to plan and deliver personalized experiences are maturing.

We’re fired up to be speaking alongside of Karen McGrane at re\Vision Boston next week. The topic of publishers moving from print to digital couldn’t be more relevant to the CMS Myth. There are still a few spots available if local folks want to join. Pro tip: Stick around one additional day to catch Karen and Ethan Marcotte for a full-day responsive web design workshop.

Look for us in Salt Lake City, Utah during the 2015 Adobe Summit, too. We’ll have our team there through the week taking in Adobe’s big vision for digital marketing—and partying after hours to Imagine Dragons. Will you be there? Let us know!

Shifting to warmer climates, we’re speaking with BMC Software at Intelligent Content 2015 in San Francisco March 23-25 on how we collaborated on a content-first approach for their massive B2B global redesign. BMC is generous in sharing some of the process-oriented details, and we’ll pass on as much as we can here on the CMS Myth in the coming months.

I hope you’ve circled your calendar for MarTech 2015, Scott Brinker’s second-annual gathering of marketing and technology leaders. I’m absolutely honored to be speaking this year on the topic of The Marketing Technology Myth. I’ll be applying some of the themes from this blog to the rapidly changing and colliding worlds of marketing and technology. Please do reach out if you’ll be in SF for the event.

This fall I’ll be leading a CMS Selection workshop at Confab’s first Confab Intensive event in Portland, Oregon this fall. Confab Central has been one of my favorite events over the years, and I’m thrilled they selected the Rose City (home of our HQ) for the first Intensive event.

What’s on tap for you in 2015?

We’re gearing up for a big year on the CMS Myth, sharing stories from the trenches and offering what insight we can muster up. We’d love to hear what content challenges you are wrestling with in your organization. Drop us a line with your biggest challenges and opportunities and we’ll explore those themes in upcoming blog posts.

With day one of Gilbane in the rear view mirror, we focus our attention on best bets for the encore performance Wednesday. After all, our adoring fans demand it (thanks Misty for encouraging our behavior).

First off, a huge thanks to everyone who showed up at our Content Happy Hour at the Harpoon Brewery tonight. It was a fantastic turnout (even with some light sleet) and the conversations were a smart mix of content, tech and snark.The IPA wasn’t too shabby either.

I don’t have the energy to write a full day one recap, seeing that I’m moderating back to back panels tomorrow starting at 8:30 a.m. (thanks for that time slot, Frank!), but do check out the full recap of the Stump the CMS consultant panel as well as James Gardner‘s tweet recap from today. Lots of good nuggets in the sessions, but as with most Gilbane events, some of the most valuable moments come from the conversations and connections between panels and at the after, after gatherings.

And now, here’s your best bets for day two of Gilbane on Wednesday Dec. 3:

Personalization, CMS and Content Strategy kicks off at 8:30 am sharp moderate by yours truly (Hey, my blog post, my session is a best bet). The real attraction here is John Berndt, CEO of The Berndt Group and Jeff Geheb, CTO of VML who bring some industrial strength expertise on the topic of personalization. We’ll have to ask them if the rumors of personalization’s demise are true or not.

Multichannel Content Management at 9:40 am with former CMS Mythbuster (now Agency Oasis strategist) looks like a sharp session featuring the Stump the CMS Consultant winner Deane Barker as well as Sandra Duram and Noz Urbina. It’s a topic that gets a lot of lip service, but not a lot of “how to.” This group can deliver on the details with Jake keeping them honest.

Agency/integrator panel discussion at 11:40 am with Digital Clarity Group turns the focus to the service providers with some “big consultancy” perspective from Accenture Interactive and DigitasLBi as well as the recently rebranded SingleStone. DCG is one of the few voices in the industry looking at the impact of service providers, which often get trumped by discussions about platform fit and less critical software feature/benefit drivel.

Content Strategy Panel at 3:30 pm will round out the day well in part because moderator Kevin P Nichols can give a master class on the topic himself. Four speakers including Misty Weaver, Community Manager of Content Insight, will provide varying perspectives on the broad topic. You can never have enough content strategy to go with your technology.

Gilbane of course extends to a third day of add on workshop options. I won’t be attending those, but look forward to hearing how they go.

I’d love to say hi to anyone who is at the event. Please do track me down and we can swap our own CMS Myths in person.

Game on Gilbane. Let’s do day two.

]]>http://www.cmsmyth.com/2014/12/gilbane-2014-day-two-best-bets/feed/1http://www.cmsmyth.com/2014/12/gilbane-2014-day-two-best-bets/Thoughts & Laughs from Gilbane Boston 2014http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheCmsMyth/~3/1mb995cotas/
http://www.cmsmyth.com/2014/12/thoughts-laughs-from-gilbane-boston-2014/#commentsWed, 03 Dec 2014 03:07:11 +0000http://www.cmsmyth.com/?p=3587We’re winding down a terrific first day at Gilbane 2014 in our hometown, Boston. With no promise of being complete or chronological, let’s revisit some of the more thoughtful, interesting, and funny moments of the day! See you tomorrow?

One of my favorite panels at Gilbane is Stump the CMS Consultant where the audience poses hard questions to a battle-tested panel of CMS experts. The 2014 edition was especially good, moderated by Jarrod Gingras of Real Story Group and featuring Praveen Ramanathan, Anne Casson and Deane Barker. Because these folks bill out at such a high day rate, I figure an hour with the three of them together is worth at least $10,000 in free consulting (if not more in what it could save you from taking a wrong turn). I live blogged the session below so we can all benefit from the wisdom, and see what is on the minds of Gilbane attendees. Apologies in advance for paraphrasing the answers. Happy to correct anything that didn’t get translated right.

And bonus: My question (noted below) was selected as the hardest, gaining me a new pair of headphones. Awesome!

Question: What is the No. 1 thing to consider when migrating to a new CMS?

Praveen: Governance. Folks usually completely forget the whole process of making sure the right people in the organization can govern the content and systems. It’s a very big blind spot.

Anne: Detailed content model and structure that breaks down all the fields at the component level.

Deane: Taking into consideration the new system and the fit to the specific purpose, as well as the competence of the integrator (if you are not building it in-house).

Audience winner: Deane
My choice: Praveen (because this is almost always missed. The others are valuable but commonly understood in my opinion)

Question: What do I do if my brand name CMS has been off the upgrade path for ~10 years?

Anne: I see this a lot. Do an assessment, but eventually you will need to switch.

Deane: Find a new CMS, but if you have to live with it, understand how malleable your current CMS is and see if you can find an integrator that can work within the system and it’s limitations. But really, you probably need to find a new CMS.

Praveen: This isn’t a tech problem if it hasn’t been upgraded for 10 years. 10 years is like 100 years in this industry. You probably have a people and process issue. Take a step back and look at the landscape.

Question: What are the tools to integrate offline/web/and database for multi-channel purposes?

Deane: WCM should be the integration hub, but have them integrating into an integration level and then pushing into channels.

Praveen: This is a systems integration challenge. You need to abstract a service layer. But you also need to look at this from a customer perspective.

Anne: Have never seen a scenario where clients have used once tool to do everything with digital content. Need to abstract data layer.

Audience winner: Anne
My choice: Deane (he’s spot on here and has been talking about this in more detail than most for years)

Question: Why should we pay for an expensive proprietary system when we can get just as good with a free/open source?

Praveen: It’s a choice. Some is cultural. IT may lean toward proprietary because they feel more safe and get official support from the source. Generally a fan of open source and encourages it in the startup

Anne: I’ve seen clients have success with open source, as well as expensive proprietary CMS. Proprietary platforms often offer more support. But open source can be a perfectly fine solution.

Deane: Depends on what your problem is. There are two big types of systems, content management and content marketing. The higher end marketing capabilities is not happening at the open source level.

Audience winner: Deane (in a landslide)
My choice: Deane (While Acquia would disagree with that POV — insightful Tom Wentworth comment in 3,2,1… — largely he’s right that the innovation on the marketing side comes from commercial vendors, not crowd sourced development platforms. This is changing, just not fast enough.)

Question: How much training can you build into a CMS? What is better addressed through guides and in-person than you can build into the system?

Anne: Need to train in-context rather than generically. You can improve templates

Deane: This depends on how manipulative the user interface is. If it’s locked down it can be hard. All users aren’t created equally (Admins, authors, developers, etc). I’m a big fan of channeled interfaces. You can solve training problems in a more targeted way for these tasked based folks that don’t need to be exposed to a CMS.

Praveen: Training should be part of an overall plan and launch strategy. Voice of the employee should be embedded into the system and end authors should be engaged in the process.

Audience Winner: Praveen
My choice: Deane (Maybe I spend too much time with Deane, but I’m a huge fan of task/channel based thinking with CMS usability. Few folks address this)

Question (This is my question): What are the biggest weaknesses/gaps that you see in the service provider landscape that prevent great outcomes on CMS driven projects?

Deane: We try and bid on projects too early. We have people come to us too early and they want a number. Too often, we’re willing to do that before we should. I believe we should have a paid project that defines the scope and cost of this. Our number is too low, or we need to pad the hell out of it. It’s disingenuous and we try hard not to do this because we provide numbers that aren’t accurate.

Praveen: Don’t push enough for the big picture and the success factors and outcomes.

Anne: Communication between creative team and tech team. We can be sitting right next to each other, but we don’t always speak the same language. We try so hard and it’s still a challenge .

Audience Winner: Anne (landslide)
My choice: Anne (Anne nailed it with Deane a close close second. Connected expertise is huge gap and hard even when everyone trying hard)

Question: As we move toward a more multi-channel/omni-channel world, how do we deal with the authoring challenges?

Praveen: Pick a CMS that has good support for Omnichannel experiences. The real trick isn’t the form factors. That’s solvable. It’s how you get the message across at the right time to the right customer ton the right device.

Anne: Forms aren’t the issue here. Solving the authoring challenges is important for consistently, but we’re not going to ever completely do away with the need of having slightly different needs. Training goes a long way here.

Deane: Granularity and forms based editing do get along. Preview is the biggest challenge here. You can’t say, hey how does this look. In what? And for what audience? You may have 30 different versions of how content gets delivered. We need systems that provide multi-channel preview which can be a big differentiator for vendors and we need to build these in for our editors.

Audience Winner (Deane)
My choice: (Deane — we need more from vendors here. It’s not easy to solve, but can get better)

Question: When does it make sense to go with a best of breed solution vs. one single vendor suite?

Anne: From where I sit as a content strategist, the problems I deal with aren’t solved by the specific systems. Don’t have the right perspective to answer this question.

Deane: be honest about what you are trying to do. The industry is so far ahead of where folks are. if you believe that your needs are truly unique and high-end, you should go best of breed. Most aren’t there. Mostly, they need to integrate.

Praveen: Has what they call a SMAC stack which looks across social, mobile and [didn't catch the other two] to evaluate if you need a best of break solution.

Audience winner: Deane
My choice: Deane (Although I thought Anne’s opt out was the right reflex. We need to make the systems we have work better.)

Question: How do you define content strategy and get consensus on the definition within your company?

Deane: Content is what goes in containers. We’re good at defining containers, but not defining what goes in them. If you get too wrapped up in the containers, it’s a problem. Content strategy addresses this.

Praveen: Content strategy starts with user experience and information architecture. Start with your user personas and understand who your users are and what content is important to them.

Anne: Content strategy is about surfacing the right content to a specific customer at the right time. And it needs to meet very specific business, and brand goals. The way to get the group behind content strategy is to understand how the artifacts fit into other disciplines and how it impacts decision making.

Many in the CMS industry mark their years by counting Gilbane conferences. I have fond memories of my first event in 2005, which means the 2014 edition will officially make it a decade of taxonomy talk and oversized vendor claims. Mainly I can trace Gilbane to some of the most meaningful professional relationships of my career, and a front row seat watching the content industry evolve, pivot, and then evolve some more.

Gilbane 2014 is back in Boston this week December 2-5 at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel (conveniently located just a few blocks away from our office). The CMS Mythbusters will again be out in force, moderating a handful of panels and hosting a social gathering. Look for myself, James Gardner, Bryant Shea, Lars von Sneidern and others from Connective DX at the event and after hours networking.

First things first, be don’t miss our Content Happy Hour at the Harpoon Brewery taking place Tuesday, Dec. 2 from 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm. Just a short walk from the conference venue, we’re hosting the event in partnership with Content Strategy New England, and hope to lift a pint with you. Please RSVP,as space is limited.

Beyond the beer, here’s some of our day one “best bets” for Tuesday, December 2:

Don’t miss opening keynotes which feature Brad Kagawa, VP of Technology from the New York Times. We covered the Times’ CMS operations earlier this year, and I’m excited to hear firsthand from Brad on what’s been happening at the Gray Lady.

Competing with Meg is a session with the Harvard Business Review which just launched a massive site overhaul this weekend. And on top of those two options, Scott Brinker (the Chief MarTech himself) is leading a panel on marketing technologists. Choose carefully – None of these deserve to be missed.

The 4 pm session on Stump the Web Content Management Consultant is always one of my favorites. In part because I am a web content management consultant, but also because of the fun format. The panel is moderated by Jarrod Gingras of Real Story Group and features Praveen Ramanathan, Anne Casson and Deane Barker. I’m particularly interested in seeing if Deane will get stumped, as I’ve never seen him short for a point of view on any question even vaguely related to CMS (or CrossFit for that matter).

That’s just a few of the places we’ll be on day one, and again, don’t forget about our brew pub gathering in the evening. We’ll post our day two best bets tomorrow. Hope to see you at the big show!

]]>http://www.cmsmyth.com/2014/12/gilbane-2014-day-one-best-bets/feed/1http://www.cmsmyth.com/2014/12/gilbane-2014-day-one-best-bets/The “Not My Job” Mythhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheCmsMyth/~3/0Yyk-2fBNI8/
http://www.cmsmyth.com/2014/11/the-not-my-job-myth/#commentsWed, 19 Nov 2014 18:08:04 +0000http://www.cmsmyth.com/?p=3564Personalization. I’m sure you’ve been hearing about it for a while now. But are you doing it? Lots of organizations have struggled to really embrace personalization. There are lots of misconceptions and few people willing to own and organize a new initiative. Personalization doesn’t happen by magic.

Some may think that personalization means switching out some copy. Others think it’s a question aligning and integrating systems. Most think it’s somebody else’s problem. The thing is, personalization is everyone’s job.

When done right personalization is about delivering a seamless, customized experience; you prove to your customers that you understand their needs and their specific context at each step. To deliver such a cohesive experience everyone on the team needs to be involved and understand who the customer is, where they are in the journey, and what they need to do right now.

Turn support from a noun to a verb

When personalization is the goal it takes everyone. And a lot of planning. As we discussed in the Path to Personalization Briefing Webinar personalization breaks down to 80% planning and 20% execution. Why? Successful personalization programs need:

the content team to understand users, their needs, and brand promise to keep the message on target,

analysts to understand the business results the team is expecting to ensure each piece is appropriately measured,

the development team to understand the mechanics of the persona, the actions we’re expecting them to take, and how we’re measuring each step to ensure all the layers come together to deliver the experience we’ve crafted

and ultimately, everyone to be consulted throughout to catch any dropped details.

And of course, all these pieces can only come together with someone to own the delivery process, and if top leadership keeps personalization a priority.

That’s a lot of expertise to bring to the fore. But personalization is also a growth process. It’s not something to put together, press a button, and walk away from. If you want to learn more about how to start planning personalization read our workshop primer.